- Lived:
- unknown — no birthplace, no dates, no biography survives; the poems know Ujjayinī (Ujjain) with a lover's intimacy and the Himālaya with a surveyor's, and the weight of scholarship sets him in the Gupta age, plausibly under Chandragupta II (r. c. 375–415 CE); by 634 CE an inscription in far-southern Karnataka already treats his fame as the measure of all poets
- Field:
- poetry and drama — the acknowledged summit of classical Sanskrit kāvya, courtly literature
- The Big Idea:
- Feeling can be given perfect form. He made a monsoon cloud carry a love letter across the whole map of India, and built a play in which love, forgotten through a curse, must be remembered — and fifteen centuries of readers, from Ujjain to Weimar, have agreed that nobody ever did either thing better.
- In their words:
- "I see thy limbs in graceful-creeping vines, / Thy glances in the eyes of gentle deer" — the exiled yakṣa's message to his wife, Meghadūta (tr. Arthur W. Ryder, 1912)
- If you remember one thing:
- India's supreme poet comes with no life attached — only seven works and a name meaning "Kālī's servant" — and for some fifteen hundred years the tradition that ranked every poet never found a reason to move him from first place.